Setting Goals That Count: A Christian Perspective

By Joe Allison

Since its first publication in 1985, Setting Goals That Count has helped thousands of people to make their God-given dreams a reality. Are you ready to start pursuing yours?

Setting Goals That Count shows how to sketch a meaningful picture of your future, based on what the Bible says about your unique calli

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jordan Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781891314094

Joe Allison

Joe Allison has been actively involved in Christian publishing for more than forty years, serving as editor and publisher at some of America's leading houses. Also a former pastor, he understands the challenges that Christian laypersons confront. This book grows out of his experience counseling people who want to discern the vocation God has given them.

Book preview

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. Are You Setting Goals Or Just Making Plans?

A troubled man from my congregation poured out his frustrations. He had made a career of government service—over twenty years so far—and he had peaked early. Promotions eluded him. Regulations hamstrung him. Yet he said, If I can hang on just a few more years I’ll be able to retire. I don’t want to lose my benefits.

He felt his job was a dead end. Many days, he just wanted to park his truck and walk away from everything. I feel trapped, he said, and I don’t know how to get out.

How old are you?

Fifty-three.

Not that old. And you’re in good health. Barring any accidents or unexpected illnesses, you should live past the average life expectancy for a man. That’s about age seventy-eight. How old were your grandfathers when they died?

They were both in their mid-eighties.

Then statistics say you’ll probably live to your eighties, too. That means you may have nearly thirty years of healthy, productive life ahead of you. So what are you doing the rest of your life?

His predicament is all too common. In our rush to make a livelihood, we Christians tend to forget our goals for life. So when we come to a critical juncture such as the last decade before retirement, we feel anxiety and fear. We don’t know where we’re going. We have no long-range goals.

This is why I believe we should study what God’s Word says about our life goals. How does God say we should set long-range goals? How does he say we should reevaluate our goals when life changes drastically and unexpectedly? These are the questions we will tackle in this book.

You will find some practical tools for goal-setting as well as step-by-step procedures for reevaluating your life goals at crucial decision points, such as my friend was facing. More important, you will be challenged to consider how your daily plans fit into the big picture of lifelong goals. You will gain a fresh perspective on the way God reveals his will to you. In short, this is more than a nuts-and-bolts manual of life planning; it’s an invitation to reassess your relationship with God.

A Christian does goal-setting and plan-making within the context of this relationship, while a non-Christian sets goals and makes crucial decisions without the benefit of it. We will come back to this matter repeatedly and test your aspirations against Scripture to see whether they are godly aspirations, because I’m convinced that we feel most satisfied when we strive to become the persons God created us to be.

Goals vs. Plans

We ought to understand the difference between a goal and a plan, because it’s easy to get the two confused. On New Year’s Day, people often make resolutions for the year ahead. These are seldom goals; rather, they are plans. That is to say, they are methods for reaching a goal. I might tell you, for example, I have a goal of losing weight this year.

Exactly what do you have in mind? you might ask.

Well, I’m going to eat no more than a thousand calories a day. (That’s not a goal; it’s a plan. It’s how I’m going to act in order to reach my goal.)

How much weight do you hope to lose?

About thirty pounds. (Again, that’s not a goal; it’s a target that indicates I am making progress toward weight loss, just as losing ten pounds or twenty pounds would be targets.)

So you press me. Why do you want to lose weight?

So that I’ll be healthier, I say. So that my body will be stronger. Perhaps I’ll even live a bit longer by taking off some excess weight.

Now that is my goal! It is the end toward which I am aiming. It is the destination I am trying to reach. All the other steps—the menus, the exercise routines, the targets for each week’s weight loss—are simply means for reaching my ultimate destination. That destination is my real goal.

For this reason, I’m not too upset if I forget my New Year’s resolutions by Ground Hog’s Day. I won’t wring my hands and say, I’ve failed again! Because resolutions are not really my goals; they are simply plans for reaching my goals. And if one plan fails, I can try another.

Here is a good way to tell the difference between a plan and a goal: Generally, we describe plans with do sentences and goals with be sentences. Here are some sample New Year’s resolutions; see if you can tell whether they are goals or plans:

• I’m going to iron shirts every Monday morning.

• I’m going to visit Aunt Sarah at the nursing home every week.

• I’m going to take a course in accounting.

All of these are do sentences. Each one describes a method or strategy for reaching a goal. Now look at these revised resolutions:

• I’m going to iron shirts every Monday morning so that I’ll be a more efficient homemaker.

• I’m going to visit Aunt Sarah every week so that I’ll be a more faithful nephew.

• I’m going to take a course in accounting so that I’ll be a better bookkeeper.

See the difference? The do sentences describe a plan of action, while the be sentences describe the result of that action. A plan describes how you intend to reach your destination; but your goal is your destination.

Keep sight of your goals—what you intend to be. Instead of thinking about what you will do in the next year, think about who you will become. That really is your goal.

I believe many of us are so busy with short-range plans that we don’t take stock of our goals, or we are so absorbed with the daily strategies of living that we forget about our goals. As a result, we don’t know if we have reached today’s goals or if we are any closer to tomorrow’s. We are obsessed with what we are going to do, so we don’t consider who we are becoming. If you want to become the person God created you to be, you need to set goals before you start making plans.

Heart vs. Mind

God influences a Christian’s goal-setting and plan-making through what we might call a spiritual internal guidance system. When engineers launched the Voyager I spacecraft in 1977 to explore the solar system and beyond, they gave it a computerized internal guidance system because they knew they could not manually steer the probe as it flew farther and farther from earth. It’s now more than twelve billion miles away, so our radio commands take more than sixteen hours to reach it. Although NASA’s mission controllers occasionally send instructions to Voyager 1, they leave daily operations to its own internal guidance system.

God has given every one of us an internal guidance system, too. It’s not electronic. It doesn’t use computer chips or cables. But something within us is capable of receiving God’s guidance, just as the Voyager I spacecraft receives course corrections from its command headquarters. The Bible calls this internal guidance system the heart.

Granted, our hearts sometimes go wrong. We must take readings against God’s Word and the counsel of other Christians to make sure we stay on God’s true course. But God does steer us inwardly, so we should pay attention to our innermost aspirations. When our hearts are properly tuned to the Lord, they will point us toward serving him.

While Scripture uses the term heart to refer to our goal-setting, it uses the term mind to